Speakers
Mike Adams
Digital News Director, WHYY
Moderator, Genetics and Race
Michael Adams is the Director of Digital News For WHYY. He is also the Managing Partner of Bridge View Media, a Philadelphia based media content creation and management firm servicing clients internationally. Throughout his long media career in television, radio, film and the Internet, he specialized in content development and distribution in both news and entertainment and was recognized with multiple Emmy awards, Edward R. Murrow awards and Associated Press and UPI awards for his work. His career has been filled with projects that pushed the boundaries of media creation and innovation, many of which helped shape the landscape we see today. He has also been a longtime advocate of civic journalism, allowing citizens to participate in shaping how news is covered and disseminated.
Classes
Sharon Ashok
Undergraduate Student in Anthropology and French and Francophone Studies, University of Pennsylvania
As an undergraduate student, Sharon has taken courses on human evolution, disease, and human osteology. Since the summer of 2015, she has worked as an intern in the Penn Museum’s Physical Anthropology Section. Her undergraduate thesis will explore the work of French physician and anthropologist, Paul Broca, as it relates to hybridity and scientific racism.
Classes
Camille Z. Charles, Ph.D.
Walter H. and Lenore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences; Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies & Education; Director, Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Charles’ research interests are in the areas of urban inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, minorities in higher education, and racial identity. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, The DuBois Review, the American Journal of Education, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Root. Dr. Charles is author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles (Russell Sage, Fall 2006), which explores class- and race-based explanations for persisting residential segregation by race. She is also nearing completion of a sole-authored book on Black racial identity in the United States, tentatively titled, The New Black: Race-Conscious or Post-Racial?
Select Resources
Classes
Claudine Cohen, Ph.D.
Professor in the History of Science and Director of the Research Program Biology and Society, École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Claudine Cohen’s research focuses particularly on the history and philosophy of Life and Earth Sciences, namely Evolutionary biology, Paleontology, Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology. In her seminars and publications, she has investigated different aspects of these disciplines and different episodes of their development. She devoted several books and lengthy papers to the history of palaeo-anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, from the birth of these disciplines in mid-19th century to the present, dealing in particular with the introduction of evolutionary ideas into their scientific elaborations, and with the role of racial and gender biases in the construction of their concepts.
Select Resources
Classes
Taunya English
Senior Health Writer, WHYY
Moderator, Biomedicine and Race
Taunya English is a senior writer for “The Pulse,” WHYY’s weekly radio show on health, science and innovation. In recent years, she’s covered the influence of neighborhoods, social policy and economics on wellbeing. Before joining WHYY, Taunya worked for the public radio station in Baltimore and as a science writer in Washington, D.C. She holds a masters degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Select Resources
Classes
Martha Farah, Ph.D.
Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society, University of Pennsylvania
Farah is a cognitive neuroscientist who works on problems at the interface of neuroscience and society. Her areas of interest include the effects of socioeconomic adversity on children’s brain development and emerging ethical, legal and social issues in neuroscience (“neuroethics”). She also teaches, advises graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and directs the Center for Neuroscience & Society and the SCAN graduate certificate program.
Select Resources
Classes
Raquel Fleskes
Doctoral Student, Molecular Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
Raquel Fleskes is a third-year Ph.D. student interested in investigating the genetic signatures of human migration through population genetics and ancient DNA. Specifically, looking at the trans-Atlantic colonization of the New World in the 17th Century Chesapeake. She is also interested in commercial genetic ancestry testing services, and their intersection with identity formation.
Classes
Christopher Heaney, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of History, Penn State; 2016-2018 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Christopher Heaney is an Assistant Professor of History at Penn State and a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the history of anthropology, grave-opening, and the collection of the dead in Peru and the Americas. His first book, Cradle of Gold (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), explored the scientific discovery and excavation of Machu Picchu, and the contest between Peru and Yale University over the contents of its graves. His current project explores the circulation of the ancient Peruvian and Inca dead, from mummies to skulls, in the early and republican Americas, and how they shaped anthropology’s formation as a discipline.
Select Resources
Classes
Paul Heaton
Academic Director, Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice
Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Paul Heaton is a Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. Much of his research aims to apply methodological insights from economics to inform issues in legal and criminal justice policy. An expert on legal and regulatory program and policy evaluation, Dr. Heaton’s criminal justice work spans a wide range of areas, including measurement of impacts of criminal justice interventions; applications of cost-benefit analysis to CJ programs; and evaluations of the CJ implications of public policies related to controlled substances. His work on policing, courts, and drug offending has been widely cited by policymakers and the media. He has also published numerous empirical studies of tort law and insurance regulation. Dr. Heaton’s work is strongly cross-disciplinary, and he has co-authored papers with legal scholars, psychologists, statisticians, physicians, criminologists, and sociologists. His research has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Yale Law Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, and American Journal of Public Health. Prior to joining Penn Law, Heaton served as the Director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
Select Resources
Classes
John Hollway, Ph.D.
Associate Dean and Executive Director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Hollway’s work involves interdisciplinary, data-driven assessments of the criminal justice system using principles of quality assurance and organizational management that have been effectively deployed in industrial contexts such as aviation, healthcare and manufacturing. The criminal justice system is the organization of our response to criminal behavior, and the Quattrone Center’s focus is on defining how that system is designed to work, assessing whether it is working as designed, and advocating for improvements to both design and implementation. As its Executive Director, he seeks to identify errors when they occur, and collaborate with police, communities, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, etc. to understand why they happen, and design environmental modifications that will prevent their recurrence so that each player in the system can be the best versions of themselves.
Select Resources
Classes
Fatimah Jackson, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology, Director of the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory, Howard University
Dr. Jackson received her Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. (cum laude with Distinction in all Subjects) from Cornell University. Her doctoral dissertation research was on The Relationship of Certain Genetic Traits to the Incidence and Intensity of Malaria in Liberia, West Africa. She has conducted research on: 1.) Human-plant coevolution, particularly the influence of phytochemicals on human metabolic effects and evolutionary processes and 2.) Population substructure in peoples of African descent, developing Ethnogenetic Layering as a computational tool to identify human microethnic groups and differential expressions of health disparities. Trained as a human biologist, Dr. Jackson has published extensively in such journals as Human Biology, Biochemical Medicine and Metabolic Biology, Journal of the National Medical Association, American Journal of Human Biology, Annals of Human Biology, BMC Biology, and most recently the American Journal of Public Health. In 2012, she was Coined by Rear Admiral Dr. Helena Mishoe, National Institutes of Health, NHLBI and US Public Health Service.
Classes
John L. Jackson, Jr., Ph.D.
Richard Perry University Professor, Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor, Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Jackson’s research examines racial and class-based differences in contemporary urban environments, including a focus on how urbanites themselves theorize and deploy those differences in everyday interactions. He uses ethnographic research methods to extend and expand Critical Race Theory as an analytical and explanatory framework for understanding contemporary social conflicts. He examines how contemporary urban religions are being mobilized to improve health literacy and health outcomes in poor and underserved communities in Philadelphia and around the world. Dr. Jackson’s also explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in scholarly research projects, as a founding member of CAMRA and PIVPE, two Penn-based initiatives organized around creating visual and performative research projects—and producing rigorous criteria for assessing them.
Classes
Grace Kao, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Kao’s research focuses on race, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational outcomes among youth. What accounts for immigrant, racial, and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes? Educational achievement and attainment differences persist for minorities and immigrants in the United States. At what age do these differences first appear? Are the educational differences of minority and immigrant children simply a reflection of their parents’ class status? Her work has used quantitative analyses of nationally-representative data on students and parents to examine these questions. Currently, she is examining determinants of achievement outcomes among elementary school children and focusing on comparing children of immigrant parents to children of native-born parents within racial groups. She is also interested in how the labor migration of parents affects children who are left behind.
Classes
Jay Kaufman, Ph.D.
Faculty of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McGill Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University
Visiting Professor (2015), Penn Programs on Race, Science, and Society, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Kaufman’s work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including perinatal outcomes and cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases. He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”. With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology”. He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Classes
Erin Kerrison, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Kerrison’s mixed-method research agenda explores punishment structures and prisoner reentry outcomes, in addition to disparities in health, education, and employment outcomes for former prisoners. She investigates the extent to which collateral consequences legislation shapes desistance among a contemporary mixed-race, mixed-gender, and drug-involved reentry cohort. Since joining Penn Law’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, her work explores systematic racial bias in the plea bargaining process and subsequent sentencing outcomes for indigent defendants in San Francisco County. Principal questions explore: whether racial disparities exist in plea offers, whether individuals held in custody pending trial are compelled to accept plea bargain offers, and what impact the race of justice system actors may have on criminal cases resolved by plea bargain. Dr. Kerrison’s research is relevant for urgent criminal justice policy agendas aimed at improving reintegration, public safety, and social equity.
Select Resources
Classes
Sara Lomax-Reese
President & CEO, WURD
Moderator, Race and Violence
Lomax-Reese is the President and CEO of WURD Radio, LLC, Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station. She is also the co-founder of The Next Majority, LLC, a new multicultural data and analytics company that seeks to develop the most comprehensive repository of open source and proprietary information about communities of color in the United States. Prior to her work with WURD and The Next Majority, Sara co-founded HealthQuest: Total Wellness for Body, Mind & Spirit, the first nationally circulated African-American consumer health magazine in the country.
Classes
Amade M’charek, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology of Science, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam
Dr. Amade M’charek’s research has focused on the social aspects of various biomedical technologies and practices, such as human genetic diversity, diversity in medical practice, and forensic genetics. She has conducted ethnographies of scientific or clinical practices looking at the entwinement of technologies and the objects of study/intervention. Her most recent research is on face-making and race-making in forensic identification (funded by a five-year ERC consolidator grant). In this study, she and her colleagues examine how technologies of face-making, aimed at the identification of a suspect or a victim, is also involved in race-making. The primary research aim is to develop methods and theoretical concepts with which to understand the simultaneous presence and absence of race in science and society. By taking into account biological factors, this research project will go beyond the social constructivist paradigm and unravel the ways in which ‘race’ is shaped as a set of relations between the biological, the social and the technical.
Select Resources
Classes
Nichelle McKelvey-Polston
Co-Host and Reporter, WHYY
Moderator, Understanding the History of Race and Science
Classes
Paul Mitchell
Doctoral Student in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Classes
Janet Monge, Ph.D.
Curator-in-Charge of the Physical Anthropology Section in the Penn Museum and Adjunct Professor in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
The Museum collection is extensive and includes both historic and archaeological skeletal collections with all skeletons 3D digitized using computed tomography. Monge’s research interests include human evolution, human skeletal biology, bioarchaeology, and life history/paleodemography. In addition, she offers research experiences in applied anthropology within forensic science and museum studies (emphasizing NAGPRA) and teaches classes in all of these topical areas. She is Director of the Museum’s Fossil Casting Program that produces over 3000 bones representing all phases of human and primate evolution—fossil casts and human skeletal materials form the core of all of her classes and are integrated into all aspects of graduate student education.
Select Resources
Classes
Dorothy Roberts, Ph.D.
George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology
Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
Director, Program on Race, Science and Society
An acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, Roberts joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair. Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.
Select Resources
Classes
Oliver Rollins, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Rollins’ research intersects three strands of sociological study: medical sociology; science, knowledge & technology; and race/ethnicity and racism. Currently, he is working on completing a book manuscript from his dissertation research concerning the social and ethical implications of neuroscience research on violent and aggressive behaviors. This research examines how neuroimaging research on the determinants of violence and aggression are formulated and structured; traces how neuroscientists understand and use race in their research on violent and aggressive behaviors; and explores the continued controversies, rebuttals and uncertainties surrounding technoscientific research of and biomedical interventions for violence and aggression. In addition, he has research and teaching interests in: racial/gendered inequalities in health, violence prevention strategies and policy, and knowledge production in biomedicine, criminal justice, and public health.
Classes
Carolyn Rouse
Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology , Princeton University
Rouse is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on how evidence and authority are used to validate truth claims and calls for social justice. Grounding her work is her interest in racialization or how race is understood, categorized, and made real within the domains of religion, medicine, development, and education. Her work in medicine explores how statistical evidence is used to make claims about health care and social justice. She focuses on uncertainties around what constitutes a racial health disparity, and the evidence-based research used to assert particular narratives of injustice and calls for reparations.
Select Resources
Classes
Theodore Schurr, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Consulting Curator in Physical Anthropology and American Sections, Penn Museum
For the past twenty-five years, Schurr has investigated the genetic prehistory of Asia and the Americas through studies of mtDNA, Y-chromosome and autosomal DNA variation in Asian, Siberian and Native American populations. Current projects include studies of genetic diversity in indigenous populations of Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. His research group is also investigating the population history of Georgia (Caucasus), Pakistan and Kazakhstan through our collaborative genetic studies in those countries.
Select Resources
Classes
Monique Scott, Ph.D.
Professor, Director of Museum Studies, Bryn Mawr College
Monique Scott is an anthropologist with a career as both a scholar of museums and as a museum professional working within museums. After receiving her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2004, Monique worked for more than ten years as head of cultural education at the American Museum of Natural History. Monique specializes in how diverse museum visitors make meaning of race and culture encoded in museum displays, as well as how diverse audiences experience traditional anthropology and natural history museums as a whole, the basis for her 2007 book Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins. Her recent research focuses on the representation of Africa in contemporary art and anthropology exhibitions—exploring the dense tension between African objects as art and artifact. At Bryn Mawr College, Monique teaches about museums in the History of Art and Anthropology Departments and is building a new interdisciplinary Museum Studies program, a model of engaged liberal arts. Monique is also a Consulting Scholar for the Africa Section at the Penn Museum, a Research Associate in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and is on the African-American Collections Committee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Select Resources
Classes
Christen Smith, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Professor Smith is a socio-cultural anthropologist who researches the reverberating effects of police violence on black families, particularly black women. Christen’s work focuses on engendered anti-Black state violence and Black communities’ responses to it in Brazil and the Americas. She is particularly interested in transnational anti-Black police violence, Black liberation struggles, the paradox of Black citizenship in the Americas, and the dialectic between the enjoyment of Black culture and the killing of Black people. Her work in Brazil uses the lens of performance to examine the immediate and long-term impact of police violence on Black people and Black community responses to this violence. Her more recent, comparative work examines the lingering, deadly impact of police violence on black women in Brazil and the U.S.
Select Resources
Classes
Quayshawn Spencer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Spencer is an analytic philosopher that focuses on Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, and Philosophy of Race. His interests in philosophy lie in the metaphysics of race, the nature of biological populations, and the natural kind realism debate.
Select Resources
Classes
Deborah A. Thomas, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator, Geography, Culture, and Race
Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, and is co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Thomas also directed and produced the documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. She is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.
Select Resources
Classes
Sarah Tishkoff, Ph.D.
David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Tishkoff studies genomic and phenotypic variation in ethnically diverse Africans. Her research combines field work, laboratory research, and computational methods to examine African population history and how genetic variation can affect a wide range of practical issues – for example, why humans have different susceptibility to disease, how they metabolize drugs, and how they adapt through evolution. She sits on the editorial boards at Genome Research; Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health;Molecular Biology and Evolution; G3 (Genes, Genomes, and Genetics). Her research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Select Resources
Classes
Rachel Watkins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, American University, Washington, DC
Rachel Watkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at American University. Her research focuses on the biological and social history of African Americans living in the 19th and 20th century urban U.S., which began with research and writing on the W. Montague Cobb skeletal collection. This research led to a broader interest in past and present studies of the human body as a ‘biological and social product’ within biological anthropology. As such, her current research and writing focuses on the use of African American skeletal remains and living bodies in the development of bioanthropological practices and racial formation.
Classes
Leniqueca Welcome
Cultural Anthropology Student, University of Pennsylvania
Leniqueca Welcome, trained as an architect and formerly practicing in Trinidad and Tobago, joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology in 2015. She is currently a 2nd year cultural anthropology PhD student. Her research site is an urban community in Trinidad know as a crime “hotspot” called Laventille. Through this site Leniqueca explores the ways politics, space, media representation and racial logics, come to define people. And in turn how people occupy and resist these definitions. More broadly she is interested in transnational issues around blackness and black liberation and uses photography as an important part of her methodology.
Classes
Michael Yudell, Ph.D.
Chair and Associate Professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health Department of Community Health and Prevention at Drexel University
Yudell is also Director of the Program in Public Health Ethics and History at the Dornsife School of Public Health. He received his PhD and MPH from Columbia University and his BA from Tufts. He is the author Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (Columbia University Press, 2014), a history that examines the way biologists, especially geneticists, shaped the race concept during the 20th century from eugenics to the sequencing of the human genome. The book pays careful attention to the ways in which scientific conceptions of human difference impact both public health and medicine. Additionally, the work has important implications for bioethics and public health ethics given race’s role in patient care and in our understandings of the health of populations.
Select Resources
Classes
About the Speaker
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas cursus pellentesque eros, eget gravida urna convallis ac. Ut id sem facilisis, finibus ligula a, sodales nunc. Morbi efficitur varius neque ac dignissim. Pellentesque mollis ut sapien at semper. Phasellus tincidunt dui placerat, lobortis odio quis, blandit sapien. Praesent risus felis, sagittis nec mi eu, fermentum consequat ligula. Praesent a finibus mi.